Here in the United States for Salesforce’s yearly conference this week, I’ve seen how customer service operators can call up huge amounts of customer data to better understand them.

In an ideal world, companies would have this one-to-one relationship with customers, anticipating what a user wants from his previous interactions.

Ironically, on this same trip, I also learnt how technology can fall down. For it is only as powerful as the weakest link in the chain of human operators providing the service in customer service.

My beef? My airline did not even dignify an e-mail from me with a reply.

Feeling feverish a few days ago, I had got in touch to ask for a seat upgrade. I was going to use my miles to do that or pay the difference to get home more comfortably on a 20-hour flight back. I could not do that online, for some reason.

Eventually, I did get my upgrade. Along the way, however, I was told – wrongly – I could not use both miles and cash to secure an upgrade. The e-mail reply came only after I had got in touch on a separate membership line, the third call I had to make to the airline.

The excellent operator on the final call essentially did the service recovery for her colleagues. She assisted by tallying my miles, getting my credit card information and immediately confirming me on the flight.

Unfortunately, what essentially was a simple matter took several people to settle. Over the years, one thing I have learnt from my airline is that its reservations and frequent flyer membership teams don’t seem to talk to one another. There are different phone numbers to call, for starters.

This is the type of experience that makes one wonder about the technology that is made exactly to enhance customer service.

For example, one feature that Salesforce, the customer relationship management (CRM) vendor, showed off this week at its yearly Dreamforce show would enable an agent to automatically monitor how often and through what channels a customer has got in touch and pre-emptively find him a solution.

This even extends to companies selling “dumb products”, like a power tool. If they have a sensor in the device to track, say, the way a user is using it, they might detect that she is using the wrong tool for a job.

Using Salesforce’s online tools, the customer service officer can then easily notify a nearby sales colleague, who could get in touch with the customer to offer a solution, in the form of another power tool – the right one.

Problem is, companies don’t do this enough. Too many large companies work in silos, delivering a fragmented experience to customers.

When marketing doesn’t talk to sales, a company will keep pushing a service to a user who is already a customer. My telecom operator SMSes me regularly on broadband deals when I already have it, along with four phone lines.

I’m not sure if my airline uses Safesforce. Whatever CRM system it is using, surely it has to look at how its human operators are affecting the system’s performance.

I put this same question to Salesforce executives this week as well. Will companies buy fancy CRM systems only to fail in their customer service because staff don’t talk to one another? Is technology really a solution in these cases?

One way is to break down barriers, said Sarah Patterson, Salesforce’s senior director for service cloud marketing. Companies can encourage staff to join in solving a problem, irrespective of the department they are in, she advised.

For example, a customer service officer receiving a query he can’t solve can put it up on a company portal, drawing replies from product experts within the company.

The idea, said Patterson, is to bring the full expertise of the company to bear, to solve an issue. This store of knowledge formed from a “swarm” of experts can, of course, be re-used should another customer come along with a similar query.

Okay, would this not make everyone so busy if they are all tending to customer queries? Well, the idea is every employee should be customer-focused, or in Salesforce lingo, “customer-obsessed”.

Realistically, how much time or effort can a company devote to solving problems? Would all this engaging with people on social media, building relationships, require more effort and ratchet up costs? Customer service, like it or not, has always been seen as a cost centre, after the sale is already in the bag.

Once again, the reply from Patterson is refreshing. If there are enough people who have benefited from great service, they would be your brand advocate, she said. They then become the ones replying to questions from fellow users on a company’s Facebook page, she added.

Indeed, I’ve seen such advocates come to a company’s defence if it comes under criticism unfairly online. That actually makes the job of the customer service team less strenuous, because problems are solved by fellow users.

Some told me to fly with on rival airlines that had improved tremendously in recent years. Others had better advice – collect frequent flyer miles on another less stringent airline and claim all their trips on my airline through their common alliance.

Clearly, CRM technology is empowering companies to learn from all the data that customers provide through so many “touch points” these days. But not all make use of it effectively. Imagine spending all that money to collect and analyse that data, only to fail in the basics of customer service.

In my case, I still flew happily on my airline. The service recovery turned an unhappy experience into a positive one. A familiar Singaporean-sounding voice on the other end of the line made me feel at home again.

All the data at the officer’s screen probably helped her reserve a seat for me, and check how many miles I’ve got. But first, she had to make the effort to help me. That human element is what CRM technology needs to succeed.